Three Bahrainis and a Saudi national were released Saturday from detention at the US prison at Guantanamo Bay . None of the released detainees was ever charged with a crime under US law. According to a Bahraini lawmaker, the three Bahraini nationals were detained by Pakistani officials four years ago in Afghanistan and sold to [...]
More than 250 people were arrested Friday night in France as rioting spread from the poor suburbs of Paris into the cities of Strasbourg and Rennes. The riots, which began late last week, originated in Parisian ghettos, where jobless rates for males under 25 years old are approaching 25%; for Muslim residents under 25 years [...]
Vice President Dick Cheney urged Republican senators during a closed meeting earlier this week to exempt CIA agents from the Senate anti-torture McCain amendment attached to the 2006 defense spending bill. The amendment, approved 90-9 in the Senate last month, was unanimously reaffirmed by voice-vote on Friday. According to an anonymous senator, Cheney, who is [...]
President Bush sent a memo to White House staff members Friday announcing mandatory "ethics" briefings next week. The week-long series of "refresher lectures" on general ethics rules and the protection of classified information appears to be in response to the recent indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby [...]
The landmark Pennsylvania federal trial debating the legality of a school district's decision to teach ninth-grade biology students the theory of anti-evolutionary intelligent design drew to a close Friday. The plaintiffs, eight families in the Dover Area School District , filed the lawsuit in November 2004 , arguing that the school district's policy, the nation's [...]
Oregon Circuit Judge Joseph Guimond Friday upheld the constitutionality of Measure 36 , an Oregon constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage . Judge Guimond rejected arguments that the Measure, defining marriage as "between one man and one woman", violated the state constitution because it made several constitutional changes at once, and unlawfully prevented local governments from [...]
Lawyers for Jumah Dossari , the Bahraini Guantanamo detainee identified as having made a suicide attempt during an October 15 visit by attorney Joshua Colangelo-Bryan , asked a federal judge Friday to order a relaxation of his solitary confinement, more communication with lawyers and relatives, and independent assessment of his medical and psychological records. Dossari [...]
Judicial Watch, Inc. v. State, Vermont Supreme Court, November 4, 2005.. Read the full text of the opinion here. Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.
A military jury Friday cleared a US Army sergeant of all charges related to his alleged abuse of a prisoner at the US-run Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan . Sgt. Duane Grubb had been charged with assault, maltreatment and making a false official statement, but testified that he had never hit prisoner Zarif Khan. Prosecutors [...]
The Vermont Supreme Court Friday ruled that a decision made by former state governor Howard Dean and Vermont's secretary of state to seal 93 boxes of sensitive papers collected during his term was legal. When he left office in 2003 Dean decided to seal the papers for ten years and joked with reporters that he [...]
